The authors of the Stanford Prison Experiment were suspected of staging. This threatens the cancellation of the results of a study that is considered canonical by psychologists around the world. The history of science knows a lot of falsifications. RIA Novosti recalls the loudest academic scandals and understands why scientists are cheating.
The journal Nature estimates that about a third of researchers are involved in plagiarism and data falsification. Of the seven thousand scientists surveyed by the magazine, 33 percent admitted to violating scientific ethics. Moreover, the older a scientist is, the more often he is ready to distort data or adjust the results. Among the respondents aged - 38 percent of those who in the last three years were involved in at least one such case. Among their young colleagues - 28 percent.
Psychological spectacle
Often data falsification is due to the fact that a scientist turns a blind eye to the imperfection of the method and ignores the requirements for experiments with people, notes Nature. For example, the subjects, when it comes to psychological research, should not receive clear instructions on how to act in a given situation, scientists should not interfere.
This is where Philip Zimbardo, the author of one of the most famous psychological experiments of the 20th century, the Stanford Prison Experiment, stumbled. He argued that people who received power would dominate and abuse their subordinates, even if they were not required to.
In 1971, a researcher selected 18 students, dividing them into two groups: guards and prisoners. For two weeks, the subjects had to mimic prison life. However, on the sixth day the experiment had to be stopped: the guards began to show sadistic inclinations, and one of the prisoners developed psychosis.
Zimbardo claimed that he and his team did not give any instructions to the subjects. A recently published article by American writer and researcher Ben Blum states that this is not the case. He found in the archives of Stanford University a recording of a conversation between Zimbardo's assistants and one of the "jailers": they explain to him how to behave with the "prisoners." In addition, Blum spoke with several participants in the experiment, and they admitted that they feigned violence, as well as psychosis and depression.
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American psychologist Philip Zimbardo / P Photo / Paul Sakuma.
Scientists expressed disappointment with Zimbardo's actions and hastened to remove the description of the Stanford prison experiment from textbooks. No one stood up to defend the disgraced psychologist.
Fake stem cells
If in the case of Zimbardo it is more about a misinterpretation of the results obtained (a particular case was extended to the entire human population) and ignoring errors in methodology, then the Japanese biologist Haruko Obokata faked the results themselves.
Haruko Obokata, an employee of Harvard University (USA) and RIKEN Research Institute (Japan), published a sensational article in Nature in January 2014 that ordinary cells can be turned into stem cells without interfering with their genetic code, simply by exposing them to acid. The Japanese woman claimed to have obtained mouse stem cells from lymph cells.
The study was groundbreaking because it opened up the prospect of creating artificial organs and tissues with a low risk of rejection. After all, stem cells can transform into any types of cells that make up the body.
But already in February, skeptics drew attention to the discrepancies in the illustrations and the text of the article. In addition, scientists who tried to replicate Obokata's experiment failed.
Dr. Haruko Obokata / AFP 2018 / Jiji Press.
In the spring, the researcher admitted to falsifying some data, but continued to insist that she had received stem cells using her method more than two hundred times. She was asked to repeat the experiment in a laboratory under 24-hour video surveillance. Obokata has tried 48 times to create stem cells without success.
She was fired from the institute, the article was withdrawn from Nature. One of the co-authors of the work, Yoshiki Sasai, who headed the laboratory where the experiments described in the article were carried out, committed suicide.
Clones that didn't exist
South Korean biologist Hwang Woo Suk became famous for being the first in the world to clone human stem cells and a dog, traditionally difficult to copy.
In articles published in Science and Nature, he claimed that he created a culture of embryonic stem cells (in such experiments, not individual cells, but whole cell generations - lines are obtained) from the cells of adults. In addition, he spent a total of 185 eggs on eleven cell lines. This is quite a bit. For comparison, the cloning of Dolly the sheep took 236 eggs.
Some scientists refused to cooperate with Hwang Woo Suk, pointing out the irregularities he committed in obtaining eggs. Seoul University, where the biologist worked, initiated an independent review of all of his research.
South Korean veterinarian and researcher Hwang Woo Suk / AFP 2018 / Jung Yeon-Je.
As a result, in addition to ethical violations in the acquisition of eggs (they were given by university students and employees), it turned out that all the results, except for cloning a dog, were falsified. Of the eleven cell lines, nine had identical DNA, meaning they were descendants of the same cell.
Science published a rebuttal. At home, the scientist was sentenced to two years probation for embezzlement of public funds and banned from doing stem cell research.
Fictional experiments
The German physicist Hendrik Schön, a specialist in microelectronics, simply made up experiments and then described the results of the experiments in accordance with his assumptions. This strategy worked well for many years, and the scientist was even considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize.
For three years (from 1998 to 2001) Shen demonstrated in organic materials almost all electronic phenomena required by the high-tech industry, from superconductivity to a single-molecular transistor. A new publication came out every eight days.
Other scientists have been unable to reproduce his experiments. And in 2002 it turned out that several of his works used the same diagram, but with different signatures. An internal investigation was launched at Bell Labs (USA), where Shen worked. The conclusions turned out to be disappointing: Shen conducted all the experiments alone, did not keep laboratory records, and destroyed samples of materials.
The physicist's scientific work was recognized as falsified. He was fired and stripped of his doctorate.
Introduced Dostoevsky and Dickens
One of the loudest scientific scandals happened in literary criticism. British researcher Arnold Harvey for 35 years wrote scientific articles under various pseudonyms (at least seven of his alter egos are known), quoted himself and invented historical facts.
In particular, in 2002, he described a meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky, when an English writer allegedly complained to a Russian colleague about mental illness: "Two personalities coexist in me." To which Dostoevsky replied: "Only two?" - and winked.
For almost ten years, literary scholars believed that Dostoevsky was personally acquainted with Dickens.
This pseudo meeting, which was later mentioned by all Dickens scholars, marked the beginning of a whole series of revelations. An American Slavist from the University of California at Berkeley, Eric Neumann, doubted the reliability of the information provided and tried to find the author of the publication, which first mentioned the conversation of famous writers.
Stephanie Harvey, who wrote that article, referred to the Gazette of the Kazakh SSR Academy of Sciences, but this journal could not be found. But the researcher was actively cited and even criticized by other scientists, the traces of whose existence Neumann also did not find. After an almost detective investigation, it turned out: all these are the pseudonyms of Arnold Harvey.
It was impossible to fire him for violating scientific ethics; by that time he did not work anywhere. The historian himself is pleased with how much noise his hoax made. In an interview, he said that he wanted to demonstrate the bias of the editors of scientific journals, who for several years refused to publish papers signed by his real name.
Alfiya Enikeeva
